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Letters to the Future
Self-Continuity and the Uncertainty of Who We Are
When I was sixteen, I wrote a letter to my future self because I was the kind of teenager who did that sort of thing. It was a quiet evening, the kind where the world outside seems to exhale into stillness, and every sound within becomes magnified — the wind blowing through my window and into the crackling sparks of the incense burning nearby. I wrote with the kind of earnestness only a teenager can muster. My words were heavy with anticipation and laced with an idealism that now feels both tender and faintly absurd. I imagined a future self who had it all figured out — a self who had stepped effortlessly into the life I was only just beginning to sketch in my mind — as a way, it seemed to me to bring that future to life.
Sixteen-year-old me would scarcely recognise me today. The certainties I clung to have been replaced by a quiet acceptance of ambiguity, the dreams revised, expanded or abandoned altogether. It is not that the self has been lost, but rather that it has fragmented, evolved, and reassembled in ways my younger self could never have foreseen. The life I inhabit now would likely perplex and perhaps even disappoint that earnest teenager, but it would also, I think, astonish them in ways they could not have imagined. The ink was a tether, an attempt to bridge the chasm between who I was…